Friday, January 11, 2008

Greenville, VA

Today was another rather rough day. I had to wake up around 5:30AM and drive through Washington DC. Amazingly, traffic wasn't too bad, but that's about the only thing that went well today. I took a wrong turn getting off the Interstate, which left me in the middle of downtown of some random city. After losing nearly half an hour trying to get back to where I was supposed to be, I got to the customer only to find that their dock was remarkably small and I had no room to get turned around. I ended up backed in there at a horrible angle, but at least I was in there.

Things just got worse at the next place, though. The area I had to back into was so small that I had to get it perfectly right, since there was no room to correct it. After about twenty minutes of trying, another driver came over to help me out and it still took another half hour for me to get in there. At this point, I was whimpering and shaking just trying to keep things under control. When I was trying to close the doors after the trailer was loaded, I had to slam them shut; in the process, one of the handles hit my face hard hard; I'm still bleeding from my lip where it struck me, despite that incident being four hours ago.

I just pulled into a truck stop here and, once again, was presented with a situation where I had to back in. Between the angle of the sun and my complete lack of confidence (or perhaps just a complete lack of ability), I couldn't back the truck into an area with four open parking spaces in a row. To put it another way, I couldn't even hit a 35-foot-wide target with my truck. I feel absolutely horrible right now, both physically and mentally. I'm hoping that getting a solid 10 hours of sleep will help with that. At least I can afford to catch up on sleep; I can deliver this load any time tomorrow, and while I'd like to get there early, getting sleep takes priority tonight.

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